


Mourning Routines

by hufflepirate



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, post-3B, surrogate fathership, too solemn for fluff but it ends on a positive note
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-29
Updated: 2014-03-29
Packaged: 2018-01-17 10:21:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1383955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hufflepirate/pseuds/hufflepirate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SPOILERS FOR THE END OF 3B AND SOME OF THE INTERVIEWS/PRESS RELEASES ABOUT SEASON 4.  Chris Argent is in mourning.  When Isaac Lahey sneaks into Allison's bedroom one night to cry over her, he recognizes that the boy is too, and he lets him.  Something about that matters, and even as their healing stays slow and imperfect, the grieving becomes a routine that fits them together better than it fit them separately.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mourning Routines

Chris Argent was a light sleeper, and lighter still in the absence of his family.  He woke up at the slightest sound, but then he usually decided that he had imagined it. There was nothing in the apartment to make a sound.  Not a single soul. He was alone.

Except he wasn't.  Not this time.  He'd spent enough time lying here, thinking about funeral arrangements and listening to the silence, to know the difference between being alone in the apartment and not being alone, even if he couldn't say what the difference was, exactly.

Getting quietly off the bed, he grabbed his handgun and crept confidently but quietly out of his room, weapon ready. He was sleep deprived and grieving. He'd cried at Allison's funeral today - actually cried - and his eyes still felt bleary from the unfamiliar moisture.  But if someone thought they could sneak into his house while he was vulnerable, they were about to find out that his aim hadn't decreased at all.  He'd gone shooting after the funeral, just trying to lose himself in the noise and the familiarity of it.  He'd been consistent and accurate.  Deadly, even.  But being deadly wouldn't bring Allison back.

The sound was louder in the hall, but he couldn't make it out until he was outside the door to Allison's room. He'd gone in once or twice, but he'd left it alone, too busy planning memorial services and funerals and receptions to pack Allison's things up.  And now someone was in there.  His heartbeat picked up for the first time since he'd heard the noise.  This wasn't right.  This wasn't right at all.

The door wasn't completely closed - he hadn't wanted it to be when he left the room last, had wanted to keep believing, in the moments where compartmentalizing didn't matter as much, that she might walk out the door like she'd never left.  Now, he pushed it open slowly, holding the handgun up to cover himself.

Then he lowered the gun back down again. It was Isaac Lahey.

The teenager was curled up on Allison's bed, face buried in her pillow.  It probably still smelled like her, and Chris was too tired for that thought not to hurt. Even if he couldn't hear Isaac's sobs, muffled by the pillow, the boy's heaving shoulders and back, obvious in the strong light of the not-quite-full moon, would have indicated that he was crying.  Chris didn't know what to do about that.  He didn't know what to say.  So he didn't. He backed out of the room and left the boy there.

But at the end of the hallway, the sounds clearer now that the door was open all the way, he realized he couldn't just leave Isaac to cry.

So he did what he'd done when Allison was little and awake in the middle of the night, what he'd done when she was sad because she'd left another town's worth of friends behind, what he'd done when her rabbit died, and what he'd done when Kate and Victoria died purely because he had no other solution.  He went to the kitchen and made hot chocolate.

Walking into Allison's room, he put the cocoa down on the bedside table and realized that he still had no words. Isaac heard the noise this time - Chris was surprised the wolf hadn't heard him before, but he couldn't say he minded, even if Isaac had just been ignoring him.  The boy sat up, wiping his red-rimmed eyes on the back of his sleeve before turning attention to where his nose had run.

"Hey!" he said, voice coming out surprisingly natural, "Use a tissue, huh?"  He grabbed a box off of Allison's dresser, trying not to think about her standing there, peering into the bureau mirror and blotting at her lipstick to get it just perfect.

Isaac sniffled.  "Sorry."

Chris scoffed.  "Using your sleeve like some kind of animal." They weren't the right words, but he didn't have the right words.

Isaac blew his nose.  "Like a werewolf," he whispered. He said werewolf like it was dirty. Maybe it was.  Allison was dead.  But she'd been fighting a fox.  Not the wolves. It was what Chris had told himself a thousand times since she'd died.  She'd been fighting the Nogitsune.  Not Isaac or Scott or Lydia or even Stiles.  It wasn't her friends' faults.  They missed her, too.

Chris wasn't sure whether he had been meant to hear that answer or not.  He left it alone. They settled into silence for a while, until Isaac broke it by reaching for the mug and sipping the cocoa. "Thank you," he said. Chris couldn't quite bring himself to say "You're Welcome."  He didn't want the boy here.  But he couldn't just kick him out, either.  Not when he was this sad.  Not when Allison's smell was still here for him, even though it was gone for Chris. Chris Argent had never wanted werewolf senses more.

Eventually, the silence was too awkward to stand. "I'm making breakfast at 6:30," he told the wolf.  And then he turned around and left.  He wasn't sure how he felt about that, other than tired. Tired and sad. And tired and sad was how he felt about everything these days, now that he didn't have any more battles to fight. He needed to pack up and move. He needed to get out of here. The feelings were going to crush him if he couldn't put them back in their box.

 

The next morning, Isaac picked at his eggs and explained that he couldn't stand being at Scott's anymore, but he didn't have anywhere else to go, because Derek's place wasn't any better.  He mentioned Erica and Boyd and Chris realized he'd forgotten them entirely.  But Isaac hadn't.  The boy had lost everyone who mattered to him, and then when he rebuilt, he'd started losing them all again.  Chris nagged him about eating his breakfast and said nothing.  It was like a reflex, like the part of him that had been a father wouldn't turn off, even if Isaac was nothing like Allison, even if he wasn't even a girl, even if Chris knew his daughter was never coming back.

 

The second night after the funeral, Isaac slipped in through the living room window and stared at Chris for a moment, waiting for a reaction and looking nervous, eyes darting to the window like he was ready to run. Chris wondered how much of Isaac showing up last night had been gut instinct.  The full moon was tomorrow night.  He nodded in Isaac's direction, and the boy vanished into Allison's room again. Chris didn't hear any crying this time, but he also slept better, just slightly, thinking the boy might be taking comfort in the space he still couldn't really enter.  It wasn't much.  But it was enough.

 

On the night of the full moon, Chris bolted all the windows and doors.  The wolves would be particularly erratic tonight, still emotional disasters after what had happened with the Nogitsune.  (And it wasn't just Isaac - he'd run into Melissa McCall yesterday and when he'd mentioned Isaac showing up at his apartment, she'd told him Scott kept crying too. She told him it was healthy. He told her he knew that. He wasn't sure he did.) But it wasn't his job to fight them, now. It wasn't his job to help them. It wasn't his job to do anything with them.

He wasn't sure what his job was, anymore. Allison was supposed to tell him. She'd inherited leadership from her mother and she'd been rising spectacularly to it.  But all he had to show for it was "Nous protégeons ceux qui ne peuvent pas se protéger eux-mêmes."  Chris was pretty sure he _was_ "those who cannot help themselves."  Guns didn't do a damn thing to stop him from feeling his losses.

A whimper woke him in the middle of the night, followed by a high and keening whine that sounded more animal than human. They body of the boy asleep on the floor in his doorway was neither right now, the face and body almost entirely human but the wolf's claws scraping outward, fighting against nothing. Chris draped a blanket over the boy, closed his door, and went back to bed.

 

After that, Isaac slept on the couch. He didn't say why he hadn't gone back to Allison's room.  Maybe he needed to be closer to the company of the living.  Maybe he wanted to protect Chris, as he'd seemed to be doing the night of the full moon. Maybe the room was starting to lose Allison's smell, even to the wolves.  Chris didn't ask.

 

When Allison's PSAT scores came in the mail a few Saturdays later, Chris sat at the kitchen table and cried like he hadn't since the funeral.  Isaac made a cup of hot cocoa and left it at his elbow without comment.  Chris liked that boy.  Unless he didn't.  Isaac's stuff started drifting into Chris's living room.  Sometimes the dishes got done without Chris doing them.  They still didn't talk much, beyond "Breakfast is at 7," and "what are you working on?" and "I'm going to the library for my English paper."

 

Isaac hadn't ordered a school yearbook. He hadn't had the $70 they cost. Not that either of them said so. Chris had been feeding and clothing the boy for months.  He knew without having to ask. Allison had ordered one, though.   The teacher of the yearbook class mailed it to the apartment because she thought Mr. Argent might like to have a copy of the nice 2-page spread they'd added for Allison in memorium. When they unwrapped it, Isaac cried harder than he had since that very first night.  Chris wasn't sure why it was this thing that had set him off, instead of all the other things, but he didn't ask.  He just placed a hand on the boy's shoulder to comfort him.

Isaac whirled around, wolf-fast, and buried his face in Chris's shoulder.  They hadn't hugged since that one time, right after it happened.  Not even at the funeral.  Not in any of the time between then and now.  They just... hadn't. But as Chris wrapped his arms around the boy's shaking shoulders, letting the werewolf squeeze him a little too tightly around the chest, he realized he didn't mind it. It felt unfamiliar, just as it had then, but it also felt right, somehow.  It felt right to be comforting the boy.  Allison's boyfriend.  The one she'd barely started dating.  The one none of them, he was pretty sure, had thought would last. And somehow he was all Chris had left of her.

Once Isaac was calm and had extricated himself, blushing, from the hug, Chris announced, "I still have Allison's ticket for my annual business trip to France this summer.  I think you should use it."

Isaac looked taken aback.  "But don't you usually meet hunters when you're there? Would it be safe?"

Chris didn't smile.  He just studied the boy for a moment, picking apart every detail of his face and analyzing the now-familiar mop of golden curls, the blue eyes that looked brighter now than they had when he'd started sleeping in Allison's room, the cheeks that had thinned for a while in the deepest part of his grief and that were fuller, now, even in their angular sharpness.

"I'll tell them you're my son," he answered, "They'll leave you alone."

It wasn't true.  The hunters would raise a fuss.  And they would never believe Isaac was his blood.  But he would handle it.  Because if he told them Isaac was his son, it wouldn't be far from the truth. When they got back to California, he'd start cleaning out Allison's things and putting them in storage, and then Isaac could have a bed again, instead of a couch.  He didn't say that to Isaac.  It was still too soon to say it out loud.  But he just might make it there.  He and Isaac both might.  And now, they would do it together.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally intended to be just the two of them kind of bonding over their grief, but ended up being a linking piece between Allison's death and the two of them leaving for France, as Davis has said they will before Season 4 . Hopefully it's ok, because it wasn't betaed. So if there's something I've missed feel free to comment. Or, you know, in general you can. But I'd especially appreciate hearing about it if I've mucked something up...


End file.
